- Time of past OR future Camino
- May 2023: Via Francigena, Lucca to Rome
For those of you who are looking to improve your French or Spanish (or German, Greek, Turkish, et al.) for the Camino, many of the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI) languages courses have been digitized and put online. They are a bit dated (some date to the 1950's), but they are in the public domain, free, and contain up to a hundred hours of audio per course.
This is the mother load for self-learners!
The main site is often down, but there are mirror sites hosting the documents at Live Lingua, antibozo, and yojik.eu.
Again, these are free and in the public domain. The downloads are in pdf and mp3 format; there are no torrents or other scary things.
Look for the Basic Courses. The "Programmatic" and "Head Start" courses aren't as well developed for use outside of the classroom. The Spanish, French, and German courses are excellent. The Italian and Portuguese ... not so much.
This is old-style drill-based learning. Concepts will be hammered into your head until they feel second nature. And they are intensive ... it took me 2 1/2 years to finish the French Basic course. And it is definitely for people who want to learn or re-learn a language; they are not phrasebooks.
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I spend a lot of time studying languages; here's some other resources for those who are also interested:
How To Learn Any Language - a great and supportive forum for independent language learners.
Pimsleur courses on audible.com - I think Pimsleur is the best out there for learning to speak easily and naturally, but it is prohibitively expensive. You can buy a full course for about $60 worth of credits on audible, which is a relative bargain.
Assimil is a unique method out of France that has a lot of courses with an English base. The course is divided into two phases: a passive phase where you listen to the dialogues but don't try to memorize them, and a second active phase where you redo the chapters but focus on the exercises. The idea is that, by the time you reach the active phase, you already have a general familiarity with the language. I love it - it's much more fun than traditional grammar books. Make sure you get the book + audio. A full course takes 4-6 months if you can commit to 30" of study a day.
____________________________________________________
And a quick note of encouragement for the "I'm not good at languages" crowd: you'd be surprised at how much progress you can make in six months with just a bit of study each day. You won't be fluent (that takes years), but you'll be able to travel comfortably and engage in polite small talk ... which can make all the difference when on the road.
This is the mother load for self-learners!
The main site is often down, but there are mirror sites hosting the documents at Live Lingua, antibozo, and yojik.eu.
Again, these are free and in the public domain. The downloads are in pdf and mp3 format; there are no torrents or other scary things.
Look for the Basic Courses. The "Programmatic" and "Head Start" courses aren't as well developed for use outside of the classroom. The Spanish, French, and German courses are excellent. The Italian and Portuguese ... not so much.
This is old-style drill-based learning. Concepts will be hammered into your head until they feel second nature. And they are intensive ... it took me 2 1/2 years to finish the French Basic course. And it is definitely for people who want to learn or re-learn a language; they are not phrasebooks.
____________________________________________________
I spend a lot of time studying languages; here's some other resources for those who are also interested:
How To Learn Any Language - a great and supportive forum for independent language learners.
Pimsleur courses on audible.com - I think Pimsleur is the best out there for learning to speak easily and naturally, but it is prohibitively expensive. You can buy a full course for about $60 worth of credits on audible, which is a relative bargain.
Assimil is a unique method out of France that has a lot of courses with an English base. The course is divided into two phases: a passive phase where you listen to the dialogues but don't try to memorize them, and a second active phase where you redo the chapters but focus on the exercises. The idea is that, by the time you reach the active phase, you already have a general familiarity with the language. I love it - it's much more fun than traditional grammar books. Make sure you get the book + audio. A full course takes 4-6 months if you can commit to 30" of study a day.
____________________________________________________
And a quick note of encouragement for the "I'm not good at languages" crowd: you'd be surprised at how much progress you can make in six months with just a bit of study each day. You won't be fluent (that takes years), but you'll be able to travel comfortably and engage in polite small talk ... which can make all the difference when on the road.
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